Controversy stalks Wambui Otieno even in death

By Nyambega Gisesa

The historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich observed that “well-behaved women seldom make history”. Neither do they lead controversial lives.

Few lives demonstrate this better than that of Wambui Otieno, the former freedom fighter and women rights’ crusader whose widower is now challenging her will.

On May 14, Peter Mbugua, the stone mason that the elderly woman married in 2003, filed an application in court contesting the will she left behind. In his application, he argues that Wambui did not have the mental capacity to make the will.

 “The deceased left a Will whose validity I have objected to on the grounds that she did not have the necessary mental capacity to know what she was doing at the time of making the Will,” says Mbugua.

The late controversial Kajiado North politician, in a will she wrote 72 days before her death is said to have wanted his husband to own two developed plots and a car so as to enable him “move around in his day-to-day endeavours”. The plots are registered as Kajiado/Kaputei/13546 and Kajiado/Kitengela/ 2811.

Manage the estate

In the will signed on June 19, 2011, the former freedom fighter distributed all her movable and immovable property and cash held in bank among her ten children and eight grandchildren. Mbugua has also filed a cross petition asking the court to allow him manage the estate of Wambui as the sole administrator.

The legal drama between Mbugua and Wambui’s two children who did not include him as one of the administrators of her estate and beneficiaries, is set to bring the relentless fighter once again to the public glare, all the way from the dead.

Born Virginia Wambui Waiyaki in 1936, Wambui was the great grandchild of Waiyaki wa Hinga, who was killed by the British in 1892.

In her typically nonconformist nature, she left home at the age of 16 and joined the Mau Mau resistance, an organisation fueled by socio-economic grievances, despite coming from a privileged Christian family.

During her lifetime, Wambui shattered numerous glass ceilings.

She endured an 18-month court battle with her late husband’s Umira Kager clan over her late husband’s burial location.

Ejected

Whereas she insisted that the late prominent advocate Silvano Melea (SM) Otieno be buried in their Upper Matasia Home in Ngong as per  his wishes, the clan insisted he be buried in Siaya, according to Luo customs and tradition.

“To bury me in Nyalgunga (Siaya) away from my children,” Blain Harden writes about SM Otieno in Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent, “is to throw me away.”

Wambui lost the case and during the burial of his husband in Nyalgunga, presiding Bishop Henry Okullu lauded the return of SM Otieno’s body by saying: “Even a bull, no matter how ferocious, is always tethered in the homestead.”

She made it to the headlines again in 2003 when she and her groom, Mbugua, kissed on national television. Although their marriage was a sign that change is possible despite forces that resist it, the union catapulted the old freedom fighter to new heights in controversy and opened a new chapter in gender relations.

Unlike Wambui and Mbugua’s marriage, most people are used to marriages between young women and men old enough to be their fathers, with prominent people like the revered Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe being quick mentions.

One year after her death, Wambui’s adult children ejected their step-father from his matrimonial home, at Forest Edge estate in Karen. Wambui’s daughters boycotted the wedding while Mbugua’s mother, refused to accept Wambui as her daughter-in-law. She later on collapsed and died.